Vice presidents: The good, the bad and the powerful

Since the creation of the American presidency, the role of the vice president has been ever evolving.

In the early days of the republic, the recipient of the second most electoral votes was given the rank of second in command.

As time went on, presidential candidates picked their running mates. Over the past six decades, the duties of the vice president expanded beyond simply presiding over the Senate as they began taking on crucial roles in policy making. And we actually began hearing from them before the election. The first vice presidential debate took place in 1976, and they’ve been a regular feature of recent campaigns.

In honor of the vice presidential debate tonight between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, Texas on the Potomac brings you the best, worst and most influential vice presidents as well as the VPs that did more harm than good.

Let’s begin with the most influential vice presidents:

5. George H.W. Bush

Selected after a hard-fought primary race with Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush brought balance to the Republican. Bush was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, a former businessman and congressman, and he held various other high ranking positions including ambassador to the U.N., chief liaison to China and director of the CIA. Bush aided the Reagan administration with foreign affairs issues including the falling of the U.S.S.R.

4. Alben Barkley

Having been thrust into the presidency during the late stages of World War II with little inside information, Harry Truman wanted to make sure his vice president was ready to take the reins at the drop of a hat. As the vice president in Truman’s second term, Alben Barkley was the first vice president to sit in on all cabinet meetings and he also sat in on meetings of the newly formed National Security Council. Barkley marked the end of the VP’s legislative duties and the start of integration into a more executive role.

3. Al Gore

Though he did not, as he claimed, invent the Internet, Al Gore was quite influential in the advancement of commercialized use of government created information-sharing network along with a number of other technological advances in the 1990s. Gore also was an advocate for environmental protection and global warming issues. His involvement in Bill Clinton’s policy making decisions was unprecedented at the time, as the two met daily to discusses matters of governance.

2. Walter Mondale

Though Walter Mondale’s legacy is not always viewed as one of success — he and President Jimmy Carter lost their re-election bid in 1980 and he suffered the second largest electoral defeat in the history of the presidency to Reagan in 1984 — he was an integral part of Carter’s administration. He was the first vice president to have an office in the West Wing of the White House and he only presided over the Senate to cast a tie-breaking vote and during electoral vote counts. He received daily intelligence briefings as a was a top aide to Carter for matters of foreign affairs.

1. Dick Cheney

Only time will tell how much influence Dick Cheney had during George W. Bush’s presidency. A former Secretary of Defense, Cheney was widely viewed as a key architect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cheney frequently was credited with having the final say in many policy discussions and was sometimes accused of over-stepping the boundaries of his office.

Now onto the worst of the worst.

5. Henry Wallace

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second vice president, Henry Wallace was not widely embraced by his party nor anyone else for that matter. He clashed with other Democratic leaders, he was viewed as sympathizing with Soviet Union and he was viewed as being a liability on the ticket in Roosevelt’s final campaign effort in 1944. He was replaced by Henry Truman who went on to succeed Roosevelt after the president died three months into his fourth term.

4. Thomas Marshall

Possibly the least enthusiastic individual to be picked as a running mate or hold the position of the vice president, Thomas Marshall frequently joked about how sparse his duties were. He and President Woodrow Wilson clashed constantly, and when the president suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, Marshall refused to accept the position of Acting President of the United States. Marshall and Wilson hardly met during the final year of their second term in office.

3. William Rufus King

William Rufus King’s ineptitude as vice president was little fault of his own as he died just six weeks after assuming office. Elected in 1852 as Franklin Pierce’s running mate, King was formally sworn in on March 24, 1853 in Cuba (where he had gone to ease the symptoms of his tuberculosis) and died April 18, 1853 back on his Alabama plantation. King was the only bachelor vice president and spent much of his time in Washington living with future President James Buchanan, the only bachelor president.

2. Aaron Burr

In 1800 Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, though both Democratic-Republicans, tied for most electoral votes, therefore the House of Representatives had to choose which would be president and which would be vice president. Despite working together to get Jefferson elected as president and Burr as VP, Burr coveted the presidency. He ultimately lost, blaming a number of people including Federalist Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson did not trust Burr and did not include him on any presidential matters. When it became clear that Burr would not be invited to run with Jefferson in 1804, he challenged Hamilton to a duel. Burr shot and mortally wounded Hamilton in what might very well be his most memorable moment as vice president.

1. Spiro Agnew

Spiro Agnew’s demise was one of several scandals that came out of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Agnew resigned from office in October 1973 and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in order to avoid a more serious bribery charge from his short stint as governor of Maryland. There is some speculation that Nixon had Agnew go public with his Justice Department indictment to deflect attention from the looming Watergate scandal.

These next two categories have to do with the best and worst running mate selections. We’ll start with the five best.

5. Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt’s youth, vigor and war record helped propel William McKinley past William Jennings Bryan and the rising populist movement. Roosevelt was instrumental in orchestrating the Spanish-American War as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and with the formation of his “rough riders” cavalry. Roosevelt spent just six months as vice president before the assassination William McKinley made way for him to become the youngest U.S. president of the United States at 42 years old.

4. Walter Mondale

Still reeling from the Watergate scandal, American voters were looking for a changing of the guard in the White House. Jimmy Carter’s modesty and transparency were just what voters wanted, but as governor of Georgia, Carter lacked high-level legislative experience. Enter Walter Mondale. As a tenured congressman from Minnesota, Mondale ended up being the perfect balance to Carter and the two young politicians edged out Gerald Ford and Bob Dole in 1976.

3. George H.W. Bush

Like Carter, Ronald Reagan was a popular governor that presented a vastly different set of ideals than the incumbent administration, but lacked experience in terms of foreign affairs. Like Mondale, Bush provided experience, international savvy and regional diversity being that he was a Massachusetts transplant based out of Texas. Bush was Reagan’s strongest competitor in the Republican primary and by adding him on the ticket, the Republicans shored up a handy victory.

2. Al Gore

Gore’s appeal is somewhat anomalous considering he and Clinton mirrored one another so closely: both were young, moderate Democrats from adjacent southern states. However, the lack of contradiction worked to their advantage as the two were seen as near equals, almost as if it were two presidents for the price of one. The youthful vigor of the Clinton-Gore ticket excited young voters as well as rural southern voters and proved to be highly successful, unseating incumbents George Bush and Dan Quayle.

1. Lyndon B. Johnson

The differences between Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy couldn’t have been more stark. Kennedy was a young Catholic Senator from Massachusetts and Johnson was an older, Protestant Texan with years more experience. The juxtaposition worked very much in their favor as JFK and LBJ won Texas and a swath of other Republican strongholds on their way to electoral victory in 1960.

And last but not least, the five biggest running mate blunders.

5. John C. Calhoun

John C. Calhoun first took the vice presidency under John Q. Adams in 1825 despite having ideas that directly contrasted those of the president (he even once a law that would allow any state to nullify any act of Congress). When Adams lost the presidency in the 1828 election to Andrew Jackson, Calhoun promptly switched sides. As Jackson’s VP, Calhoun managed to upset off his second boss, too, and ended up getting canned along with the entire Cabinet.

4. Bill Miller

Never heard of him? Well that’s what many Republicans thought when Barry Goldwater selected Bill Miller, a little-known congressman from upstate New York, to be his running mate in 1964. Goldwater’s main justification for picking miller? “He drives Johnson nuts.” Johnson would have been a formidable opponent no matter what, but the Miller selection probably didn’t help Goldwater as Johnson won by a resounding 434 electoral votes.

3. Spiro Agnew

Conventional knowledge says not pick a running mate with any nasty skeletons in their closet that could pop out at an inopportune time. Nixon defied this basic logic when he stuck with Spiro Agnew in 1972. Nixon’s route worked in the short term as he handily won re-election by more than 500 electoral votes. However, the wheels began falling off within the first year of the second term and Agnew was the one to get things going when he resigned in disgrace.

2. Dan Quayle

Billed as a Republican John F. Kennedy, Dan Quayle might have seemed like a solid choice for a running mate, but shortly after the 42-year-old Indiana senator opened his mouth, that perception went out the window. His most notable faux pas came in his 1988 vice presidential debate when he willfully compared himself to JFK only to have the proposition thrown back in his face by Democratic candidate Lloyd Bentson. Bush and Quayle won in 1988 but they did not have such luck in the following election cycle.

1. Thomas Eagleton

Getting back to the whole skeletons in the closet rule; while bribery and tax evasion might be bad there are a few qualities in a candidate that are just a bit worse — like having undergone electric shock therapy. This little tidbit of information came out about Democratic candidate George McGovern’s running mate Thomas Eagleton during the 1972 campaign. Though McGovern initially said he stood behind Eagleton “1,000 percent,” he eventually had to drop him from the ticket. McGovern’s campaign never recovered and he was crushed in the election 520-17, only winning Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.